Tuesday’s primaries

5 takeaways from Tuesday’s primaries

Clinton seals it, Trump’s in trouble and Bernie searches for an elegant exit.

By Glenn Thrush

Donald Trump finally broke through the crass ceiling.

Trump’s campaign is in turmoil, oh, and he’s groping for a grown-up message. Trump trails in every single head-to-head matchup against every single Democrat. Trump won’t read a briefing paper, won’t pass up an opportunity to heckle a chump, won’t use decent grammar, a competent hairdresser or a polysyllabic speechwriter.

Yet the Tangerine Tornado keeps winning and winning, by huger and huger margins – shattering the Never-Trump army and making mockery of the shotgun marriage between chastened foes Ted Cruz and John Kasich. Whether he’ll hit the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination before Cleveland, nobody knows, but the developer-reality-star-frontrunner did something in five big races Tuesday night that he’s never done before: He consolidated the GOP base behind him with a succession of slam-dunk wins that will make it hard for his opponents to argue he’s not the party’s legit choice.

In most of his previous wins, he struggled to break 50 percent – on Tuesday he won with 60 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, a semi-battleground in November that he’ll need to win if he’s to avoid the loserland fates of Goldwater, Mondale and McGovern.

Oh, and Hillary Clinton did pretty well too. Here are five takeaways.

1. Bernie’s Choice. Sanders is not going to be the Democratic nominee (A little secret: Despite the hype, and Sanders small-state seven-of-eight winning streak, the result was mostly baked in after Clinton’s five-state sweep on March 15, and the door more or less slammed shut after his 16-point defeat in New York). But after losing another three big northeastern (non-“South”) states – Pennsylvania and Maryland – Sanders seems to be trapped in a classic delegate death spiral. He trails Clinton by more than 200 pledged delegates and hundreds more when you throw in super-delegates. But he’s not going gently.

Tuesday night in West Virginia, swigging water to soothe his shredded throat from a huge Bernie Bottle, the Vermont senator raged against the gathering gloom – making a direct pitch to supers (party regulars who are highly unlikely to buy his argument) that he’s better positioned to beat Trump in November. This is superficially true: But Sanders hasn’t absorbed a fraction of the attacks Clinton has – and it’s not clear he would be doing as well had he been in the crosshairs.

But this email from a Sanders supporter (and former Clinton Democratic Senate opponent) Jonathan Tasini speaks of the precarious state of his candidacy, despite the in-rushing millions in online cash, and adoring crowds of college kids. “I think it's clear that, ***at least tonight***, Bernie intends on forging ahead all the way to the convention no matter the results tonight,” wrote Tasini.

The Sanders campaign seems to be deeply divided on the subject of how best to proceed. Early Tuesday, Sanders top strategist Tad Devine – head of the peace party in Camp Bernie – hinted of a Wednesday reassessment; that was followed by a fundraising email from campaign manager Jeff Weaver – he of the fixed-brow and warlike scowl – featuring a photo of the Clintons yucking it up with Trump.

None of this matters. His play now is for leverage on the issues he cares most about – campaign finance reform and income inequality – and he needs to decide whether he’ll go rogue (as the Sarandon-Robbins wing of his base wants) or do what he’s always done in the Senate: Accept his fate as an influential but not-dominant force in the Democratic party, swallow hard, and join the fold.

2. Hoosier or loser. Nobody’s run a more clever, message-disciplined, tightly organized campaign than the tea party prig-turned-darling of the GOP establishment, Ted Cruz. But Cruz, with that squinty-eyed, sepulchral smile, is just not likeable enough for voters. Cruz seemed poised to break out of his Southern evangelical box with his big win in Wisconsin – but Tuesday’s crushing losses means his win there was a blip not a race reset, and speaks to his lack of broad appeal.

Cruz has one more shot: A decisive win in the suddenly seminal Indiana primary on May 3. The state seems to be a much better fit than the northeast where Cruz’s cornbread conservatism played poorly.

John Kasich, governor of neighboring Ohio, is going nowhere even faster than Cruz, and conceded the inevitable a couple of days ago – issuing himself a get-out-of-Indiana-free-card. “Given the current dynamics of the primary there, we will shift our campaign’s resources West and give the Cruz campaign a clear path in Indiana,” he wrote in a press release. Oh, if only it were that easy.

A few hours before his rollicking victories on Tuesday night, Trump announced he’d been endorsed by chair-throwing Hoosier hoops legend Bobby Knight, who has been politically incorrect even longer than The Donald.

3. A pax on both their houses? During a triumphant victory speech in Philly (where the candidate seemed to be uncommonly relaxed) Clinton offered Sanders an olive branch bristling with small rhetorical thorns – an entreaty to begin peace talks, but only on victor’s terms. For all his determination to gut it out through the convention, Sanders has sprinkled a discreet bread crumb trail of reconciliation, suggesting this week that Clinton could reunite the party, but only if she heeded the anti-establishment clamor from his increasingly embittered millions.

“We will unify our party to win this election,” she intoned to shouts of agreement – a couple of weeks after telling me that she doubted whether her opponent was even a real Democrat.

Then, a more direct appeal to Bernie and his bros: “I applaud Senator Sanders for challenging us to get unaccountable money out our politics,” she added, a few days after Sanders’ team had, for the millionth time, demanded she release the text of her Goldman Sachs speeches.

How they come together (or don’t) will likely be the most important Democratic storyline of 2016.

In 2008, Clinton – faced with a considerably more sanguine scenario at this point in her campaign (she trailed Barack Obama by far fewer delegates and had yet to see her grip on party-insider super-delegates slip away) – soldiered on through the California primary. Publicly, her people say they expect Sanders to do the same, and respect him for his pluck. In private, they want no such thing – and desperately hope to find an elegant way to make the man go away, or at least tone down his attacks, so she can spend the next few months repairing her tattered approval ratings and building bridges with progressives.

4. Trump is still in deep, deep trouble. Not since Ozymandias has a colossus stood on such crumbly legs. For all his big primary wins Tuesday night, the easy money (right now, anyway) is that he’d lose every single one of them in a general election -- Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland, Connecticut and even Pennsylvania -- by massive, perhaps unprecedented margins.

Two-thirds of American voters disapprove of Trump – and a significant percentage of those people have said they will never, ever, not-if-he-was-the-last-man-on-earth vote for him. His hands may be big enough, but they grab too many five-irons and too few white papers for many college-educated voters to buy him as a serious presidential possibility. And there aren’t enough angry white working-class voters to make up for the tsunami of opposition from minorities and women he’s likely to face.

He’s giving a big foreign policy speech in DC on Wednesday – presumably employing the TelePrompTer that he’s long mocked Obama for using, presumably brimming with actual names, facts and figures he’s eschewed in the past. But if reports out of his camp are to be believed, he refuses to be domesticated, and happily blew through the advice of new adviser Paul Manafort to behave more like a conventional leader during the Acela primaries.

That was either a huge, campaign-killing mistake – or merely a veteran pitchman’s awareness that you can’t change your brand halfway through a marketing campaign without destroying the product. Either way, he's screwed.

5. Lady’s Night. It’s a symptom of Trump’s centrality that Clinton, following her successes on Tuesday, stood on the precipice of history and hardly anyone noticed – except her. She has more or less secured her position as the first female nominee of a major party – and in 2016 that’s not merely a glass-ceiling shattering feel-good moment, but a hammer to use against a Republican frontrunner who systematically alienated women.

Responding to Trump’s recent claim that she was playing the “woman card,” a smiling Clinton told her victory-night audience “Deal me in!” That won't be the last time you hear that line.